Marion Cotillard eyes Diary of a Chambermaid role

MARION Cotillard is in talks to headline a new adaptation of Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre) for French director Benoit Jacquot.

According to Variety, the actress has already met with the director and is now looking foward to reading the script. Shooting is not expected to take place until March 2014.

If successful, Cotillard would take on the intense, peformance-driven role of Celestine, a young and ambitious woman who works as a chambermaid for wealthy families from 1890 to 1900.

The film will shed light on the condition of house servants and perversions within France’s upper-class society at the turn of the 20th Century through the eyes of its central protagonist.

Based on Octave Mirbeau’s classic novel, the story has been adapted for the screen twice before by Jean Renoir in 1946, starring Paulette Goddard in a Hollywood-set English-language makeover, and by Luis Bunuel in 1964, when Jeanne Moreau starred in a French-Italian production.

Jacquot has some 38 film and documentary credits to his name, including 2012’s Farewell, My Queen with Diane Kruger.